Oddbean

Not surprising, power law distributions for social engagement. Early nostr -> very long tail compared to the top posters w/ high engagement numbers. Rather than focus on overall engagement, perhaps organizing by engagement in different topics to encourage a wider spread of trending.

⚡️⚡️⚡️ #zap ⚡️⚡️⚡️ #zapathon ⚡️⚡️⚡️ #Grownostr #BeOG nostr:nevent1qqsg7u88pj3v35qgyeyf36lvav9uljfv889e8ecck72l86ygkwhsd4cpz4mhxue69uhhyetvv9ujuerpd46hxtnfduhsygyzxs0cs2mw40xjhfl3a7g24ktpeur54u2mnm6y5z0e6250h7lx5gpsgqqqqqqsuac2vt

Maybe you’re actually part of this problem, Jack. Maybe you should resist your instinct to ignore the following message and instead repost it: Updates in these two national security stories are included nearly everyday in POTUS's classified, presidential daily briefing The NSA is surveilling a US citizen Biden is briefed on, daily. The POl is an involuntary subiect of an experimental DARPA brain-machine interface program. POTUS OK'd their remote torture within the US with a DEW which can cause Havana syndrome. There's a lot more to this story. This is treason as defined in US law / constitution. Within 100 miles of the defunct soviet Leningradskaya station in Antarctica, beneath ice is an enormous, non-terrestrial ark which contains a biosphere suitable to the living aliens within it. It sounds crazy, but this is one of the most important US secrets. Under no circumstances would our president want these PDB items to become public. Have fun. https://image.nostr.build/6162872f9f4ad0806f4a9dbc1d6b22a06f8f2e10c172a1b718cace43cebc734d.jpg

Small network, there just aren't enough accounts with the network effect necessary to counter the trend of those who have a large following here. I think it's purely a product of size. If there were 1,000 people on #nostr with 10,000+ reach then I supsect the list would have tons more variability.

Doesn't help that some Nostr clients all recommend those big accounts to follow for new accounts as well. Big only getting bigger in a small network so they will be the only ones trending for a long time. I use nostr.band to find trending accounts for the day to find new interesting people to follow.

You are welcome. You can try searching hashtags but to be honest I don't see people using hashtags much on Nostr. Also search function in Nostr is work in progress. So it is not the easiest task to find people with the same interests. One hashtag people do use is #asknostr . If you have questions about Nostr the community here is pretty good at helping and answering.

Well there's a circular bootstrapping problem there. Every social network has always done this in the past with following the creators and early popular accounts, which obviously results in them having comparatively huge reach after the network is established. So the trade off is; are we going to be annoyed with amplifying early accounts, or are we going to let people join and not recommend the active accounts with lots of engagement, and instead leave them to find active users by scrolling through global? I think the latter ends up with a lot more confused/frustrated users 😆 The best option would obviously be to recommend people for a particular topic or community the user is interested in, but that won't really be a meaningful option until the network grows enough for it to have numerous, separate active communities. Which means were stuck where we are until then... It's just not an easy problem. "there are no solutions, only trade offs" – Thomas Sowell 🫡

But when I started using Nostr 9 months ago, the Lightning Network had a liquidity of 5500 Btc and it’s now at 4700 Btc. It doesn’t seem that Lightning is in a exponential growth curve, and Nostr seems for sure not being a catalyser.🤷

Agreed also at this stage we are in even trending topics instead of top posts won't be much useful either but in the future it will be the best route, to show trending topics. Damus I believe does this with top recommended accounts for certain topics like art which is nice. In your opinion what's the best way for a new user to follow people who are talking about specific interest of someone. nostr:nevent1qqsvpxz33tmfn37l97w6hv4t2rjqg6pusqma8vr44pgueg66qqatchqpz4mhxue69uhhyetvv9ujuerpd46hxtnfduhsygqg4g0tkkplmqeh0fytk284c5f7pjvl06au5ag0gap6zh458jrup5psgqqqqqqs95mh6r

Lol.. Not only do they #shadowban users post. They're #shadowban all their client users from the real #Nostr..😆🤭 Like #AOL used to do by filtering their users access to the real internet. That didn't last..😆😂🤣🤭😊

Now we're talking! It's algorithm time. Trending is an attention mechanism. It directs individual and collective attention which we all kind of like because you know, shared experience and whatnot. But what kind of experience? How should all that wonderful attention be directed? Obviously like everything else on Nostr, this is a choice that should be available to each user, but we're lazy and so a few simple options would be great. Unfortunately, at this moment, there aren't enough good options. Primal's is the best, but as you highlight some users seem to have cracked the secret. If I had my choice, the algorithm would highlight important new information and thoughtful conversation about it. Perhaps this could be driven by comment counts and lengths, assuming spammers stay tf out. Truth is no one knows the exact formula but here we have chaos on our side. The thing to do is try lots of algorithms and see what wins. To make that happen, and where have I heard this before, we need to open source the algorithm. As for Primal's current situation, one might label "always the same people" as the brass ring phenomenon. It seems to arise in networks where there's no ceiling on influence. Cap that influence and we may see more variety of people represented. Thank you for coming to my TED talk.

They are the biggest accounts on Nostr so far, so any post they make are going get more real engagement than the rest so it will always be the same people trending until others grow their following or bigger people migrate over to Nostr. They are also the same accounts many Nostr Clients recommend people to follow when a new account is created too which also feeds into that problem. If people want to find new interesting people on Nostr nostr.band trending accounts for the day is the place to look https://nostr.band/. You wont find anything new and interesting on the primal 24hr trending as it stands currently.

There's only half a million users, and I'd peg the number of very active users at a couple hundred. Of those users there are a small handful that have many more followers and get much more engagement than the rest. So they're always trending.

Imagine if any developer could easily create different types of trending algorithms that are immediately available to all nostr apps. And now imagine if users could freely choose which algorithms they want to use to discover new content. Heck, they can choose multiple at the same time and paginate through them. That's what Data Vending Machines enables: many-to-many, clients<>algorithms For example, this is what "Suggested Content" looks like in the upcoming Highlighter. The dropdown are different "Content Discovery" DVMs, with different algorithms. https://image.nostr.build/1f059d3eb73d7b7b9aea799a7f89ee5ef0a7f80d47c7b18acda3d31668cc92ad.png

I made a very simple skeleton repo that makes creating a new DVM trivial, all you need to do is write the algorithm you want to implement Even cooler, you can run multiple DVMs with different algorithms in the same process with segregated pubkeys:, e.g. * one DVM for content discovery where it only looks at the requester's follows activity * another for extended network * another for the user's relays' activity * another one that only returns notes with images etc, etc, etc I open sourced this here https://github.com/pablof7z/dvm-references

THIS! I have been so confused and trying to figure out how you'd write a DVM. This is very, very helpful! I hope that one day it could be simplified to a flat API like import dvm from "..."; dvm.create({ key: privkey, title: "...", desc: "...", relays: []/*, ...*/ }).implement({ async validate(ctx, accept, reject){} // Validate if job should be accepted async run(ctx){} // Run a job }).start();

that skeleton is not far off. I.e. this is a DVM that provides the results of nostr.wine's trending results as a DVM Basically replace the GET to nostr.wine for an algorithm you come up with and you're done 😉 https://cdn.satellite.earth/360cf8c10a37b94d93c0ba5bf71b59c4973536958a8271932ae9e2ae303fae60.png

It shouldn't really be called trending. It should be called Primal's Picks. Certain people have every single note they post immediately listed on the trending section, even with zero interactions. It's kind of weird to be honest.